Eternal We Stand
by CBK1000
Summary: A man lives a thousand years, and still he understands nothing. Fifth in an ongoing AU Originals series Klaroline


**A/N: So is anybody still here after the last fic? No? Fuck me? **

**So here be the fifth one-shot. (This series is just moving right along, for something that was once upon a time supposed to be just a one-shot. Over 100,000 words later, I'm not sure whether to laugh at myself or weep a little. Where has my LIFE gone?!)**

**I don't have too much to say (for once) other than a quick little note about a character who appears briefly in this, who played a very minor role in the second one-shot of this series, which is alluded to in a conversation with Klaus. I didn't know if anyone remembers, since it was a while ago now, but if you recall that little parade of Marcel's which went rather fantastically wrong, some of his minions approached Klaus and Caroline while they stood watching, and Klaus killed one of them and compelled another, Jack, to eat his entire family if he were issued any orders by Marcel to harm Caroline. That compulsion comes up again, and so I thought I would clarify a little, since I'm sure none of you read back through these as obsessively as I do.**

**Thank you all for your reviews, your favorites, your comments on tumblr- just your support in general. And to those of you who considered me worthy to nominate and vote for in The Klaroline Awards currently ongoing over on tumblr, thank you so much.**

**Now let's kick this bitch off.**

* * *

"Monday saw the city in chaos after two bombings in the French Quarter which left twenty dead and unknown numbers injured, and may be connected to a recent surge in what the NOPD believes to be gang-related violence-"

In her new home with its jetted bath and its inch-thick carpet she clicks off the twenty inch screen and in the adjoining sitting room where there is no scraping of brush or scratching of charcoal she sits alone holding a book she cannot read.

* * *

In the room he designated as hers he goes to work, smashing this, overturning that, kicking about, shredding apart, everything in a confetti around him, but look how _broken_ is this room he designated as hers and still he is not sated, still he will not be _filled_-

He spends three hours fastidiously putting everything back where it belongs.

* * *

She studies _The Art of War _and Tom Barry's _Guerilla Days In Ireland_ and with everything he has taught her she creeps about the city unnoticed, making observations here, collecting interviews there, but there's this…hollowness about the whole thing now.

There are the sweating palms, the thundering heart, her years too short and her experience too little, but underneath all of this there circle always the smiles he used to give her and the last he ever showed her, and if he could have just figured out a little freaking _sooner _that she was just a body to be used, that like all the others before him he only wanted a little blonde slice until her voice became too shrill and her neuroses too grating and her cheerfulness too much.

Excuse _her_, after all, for looking past and believing in more and for just _once _allowing herself to accept that maybe for so many times before has she come second but not now, never with _him_, but how _stupid _of her, right- brainless blonde _Barbie _Caroline who of freaking _course _could never be loved that way- make her laugh, force her to care, take her hope, smash her heart, but _love_, no, _never_- how could she even possibly entertain such a ridiculous freaking notion, right, _right you stupid jerk_-

She calls her mother everyday.

Mommy, she says so brightly.

She is doing good.

Classes are great.

She has made so many friends and gained so much experience and yes how much she misses this last remaining piece of her family, but she is truly honestly _happy _here, mom.

Don't worry about your little girl, who cries herself to sleep, who was almost something more, who took her faith and poured it so hard into all the wrong places.

* * *

Stop moping, Rebekah commands, lounging about on his furniture and rooting around in his studio and eliminating from the bathroom every last little remnant of her presence.

He buys three bottles of that one particular scent she always wore, and he tucks away behind his easel, his bed board, his music collection these chemical reminders of her hair in his hand and her lips against his own, and when one night before his canvas he recalls the longing she stirred and the hope she extinguished, he takes these bottles, and he flings them one by one against the wall of his studio, splattering all the scattered paraphernalia of this hobby in which he immerses himself so completely.

He plots mechanically and he kills automatically.

When one day the twitchy little minion of Marcel's who dared challenge him face to face appears on his doorstep to beg _please_, remove the compulsion, they are all he _has_, give him any task, ask him any favor, he leads the boy up the stairs to his maps, and he seats himself like a king upon his throne behind this desk she organized so neatly.

Jack, isn't it?

From the parade?

He smiles and he steeples his fingers, and with a nod of his head he gestures toward these maps which hold still the little red pinpricks of the thumbtacks she scattered across their surfaces. "Why don't you go on and make yourself useful then, mate."

"And then you'll take the compulsion off?" the boy asks eagerly. "I can't keep dodging Marcel, man- he'll give me some order that I can't- I can't-"

He furrows his brow and wrinkles together his lips and nods sympathetically. "Of course, mate- of course. Not your fault- you've just fallen in with a bit of bad company, that's all. I'm not completely heartless, you know."

"So if I tell you whatever I know about Marcel's organization, you'll lift the compulsion?"

He will certainly take it under consideration, he promises, putting his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head.

It takes the boy an hour to pencil in all his little notes, his hands shaking and his voice unsteady.

Such hope in his eyes, this young boy. Time has not yet sanded it away, he stands still untouched by war, he has been exposed to so little.

Look at this as one of those difficult life lessons which all men must sooner or later experience, mate.

Hope is only a cruelty with which man has been equipped because the universe must have its little chuckle at those who must always bow before its superiority.

"What did you say you had? A mother and a sister? Two younger brothers?"

"Yeah."

He keeps his feet on the desk and flips one hand dismissively out in front of him. "Eat them all. Start with whoever you think will be quietest; much better to save the ones who scream for last."

How white the boy's face goes.

How quickly his knees buckle and his hands dart out to clutch this desk which is suddenly his anchor- how _new _he is to this sort of despair which hinges the knee and pries wide the mouth and bottoms out the stomach.

Doesn't it ache, to be torn so quickly from this hope which sets its spark to man's frail tinder heart- doesn't the chest burn- do the lungs not seize, the throat fasten, the eyes smolder- do you not grope about with your stunned guppy lips for a bit of air, the barest thread of this infinitesimal molecule which man requires but monster may go without- feel how much you need it in this moment- desperate lungs, frantic heart, panicked esophagus- look at what you have been _reduced _to-

He smiles pleasantly.

"Sorry, mate. I'm in a bit of a mood. My condolences for your loss, though."

* * *

He keeps an eye on the Renaissance Arts Hotel where she has taken up residence, and when three of Marcel's lackeys stray too close to this imperial old building she now calls home, he drags them away to their alleyway deaths.

He lingers long enough to ensure her safety, to glimpse her hair, to spot her smile.

Once, he nearly approaches her.

There is a street musician on the corner who plays with shut eyes and darting bow, and one morning when she is halfway to the cross walk beyond him, she stops suddenly and she swings herself round and she walks back.

She stands listening with her smile that does not reach her eyes.

Bach's Arioso, he wants to tell her.

What does she think, how does she like it, what does she _feel_, standing there with her curls made molten by the sun and her head swaying just slightly to the notes.

Caroline-

Caroline, if you had perhaps just given him a little more _time_, sweetheart- if you had just let him _prove._

He always vanishes before she can look up.

* * *

"Nik's always been fickle like this."

She flicks her eyes slowly up from the book she has laid flat across the little café table in front of her, darting one hand out for the pastry Rebekah eyes possessively as she slides into the seat across from her.

"Excuse me?"

"My brother- you know the one. Blue eyes, blonde hair, predisposed to stabbing anything that displeases him?" She smiles. "The one who finally came to his senses and pitched you out on your common little behind?"

She snaps the book shut. "I meant 'excuse me' as in what the hell do you think you're doing, and so help me _God_, touch my beignet and I will rip out your hair."

"I'd love to watch you attempt it."

"Ok, I don't know what you're doing here, but I just want to emphasize that you are very not welcome. Maybe you weren't getting that."

"I was just curious, Caroline- what happened to not sleeping with everyone you make eye contact with? What was the last straw? Let me guess- he called you pretty, told you you were special, drew you some sweet little picture; my God, how naive can you be? You know he does this all the time, right? He gets these little crushes, he makes the girl feel like it's all about her, like she'll be the only one for the rest of his very long life, and then they give him what he wants, and he moves on. It isn't in Nik to love anyone other than himself. He's not going to be the boy who forsook all others for special little Caroline Forbes."

For a very long time she sits saying nothing, book forgotten, beignet untouched, coffee cooling.

"Ever wonder why you don't have any friends?" she asks with thick tongue and tight throat, and then she stands, and she blurs away into the crowd.

* * *

She helps herself to the girl's beignet.

* * *

"Well, Caroline's been busy in your absence," she announces as she breezes through the door, hair bouncing, hands full.

She sets her shopping bags down in the entrance. "And she certainly isn't sitting around sulking like a child who's had his toy taken away."

"Out with whatever it is you want to share, Rebekah," he spits, his fingers tightening around the tumbler of b positive in his hand.

"Aren't you stalking her? Shouldn't you know already?"

"Know _what_, Rebekah- I don't have the patience for your little guessing games."

"She's been hitting up all the clubs. Different boy just about every night, it looks like. Maybe you bored her and she's after a bit of variety? Or maybe your technique's a little rusty? You've practically been a priest since you met her. What was that all about anyway, Nik? Don't tell me you've been saving yourself for some girl who picked some mutt over you. Didn't you used have pride once, brother? What was that little motto of yours- 'love is a vampire's greatest weakness'?"

He takes a sip.

He rolls it slowly around in his mouth, this rich red liquor of man. "Whatever Caroline does is no concern of mine," he says so calmly, and then he walks up the stairs to his studio, and he smashes to pieces this latest work over which he has labored for so long, strewing its pieces in a canvas snow over the workbench, the floor, the sketchpads.

* * *

Autumn comes, and she abandons her warm spiced exhales in flurries along the city: paprika leaves, saffron branches, chili dust.

New Orleans hardly wavers in her oppressive jungle onslaught, but in the wind there lingers now a little nip of frost, an assurance of Christmas crispness.

Mornings bite, evenings chill.

He wonders how much she has seen of snow, this equatorial girl who comprehends so little of the world.

The southern U.S. gets its little touches of this arctic flour, of course, but has she ever stood in mounds to her hip; has she ever waded through entire banks of this cold which stings to awareness every little forgotten part of man; for how many mornings has she risen with the sun to watch its fire simmer in cold white lakes, to bake crust from cream, to dissolve crystal, thaw sleet, soften grass-

Caroline, love, he thinks as he watches from this distance created by her and widened by him.

If he had never- if perhaps he had tried- if he only- was there anything he could have _done_, sweetheart? Is there preserved in him any modicum of the boy who loved his brothers, who was adored by his sister, who might once have been cherished by this girl he cannot let go though she never intended to hold him back?

* * *

Jane-Ann has heard rumor of her transformation, of course, but to be regaled with fourth-hand descriptions is never the fucking same.

It's when you watch the veins show through and the fangs slip down that you finally fucking _get it_, that you understand Sophie who traded you teddy bears and exchanged lip gloss for liner exists still in body but not soul, that what stands before you with its calligraphy skin and its empty black eyes is no longer sister but _thing_.

So she runs on alone.

You think you understand this word, alone, when you have a family to back you and friends to stand tall beside you.

It is an absence, alone, a venturing out with no accompaniment of friend, foe, or family, days behind doors and nights under blankets, the world sieved through earphones, life experienced beyond glass.

No one goddamned _understands _you beyond your window and behind your computer.

But you let her tell you a fucking _thing_.

What is _alone _until you have gone to sleep a corpse and you have woken up a monster; what is fucking _alone _until you have dodged your silent wax dummy death and you have walked on eternal zombie tiptoes into a city that no longer wants you; what is fucking _alone _to _you_ with your goddamned warm human fingers and your weak hourglass heart and your clockwork fucking brain, ticking away toward mortality?

* * *

It's funny, how much her enhanced nose and eyes and ears still miss.

There is the brief whistling of displaced air, sudden pressure against her shoulders, the crack of cement beneath her, the thundering of gunfire over her, shrieking crowd, panicking pedestrians, her hands trampled and her curls stomped, humanity in a gush all above her-

She rolls to her stomach, drags herself from the swell, digs in with her fingernails to propel herself in a reptile slithering across the sidewalk to the Renaissance's doorway, heart in her ears, her throat, her thighs, all of her one single pulse, a throbbing-

There is another flurry of shots.

The tide surges again, heaps up, spills over, knots and frantically disentangles itself to run on, shoving as it goes, elbowing openings, kicking pathways-

She spins.

There is a gunman dead in the street, two in his chest, one in his head, pistol beside him, cheeks chalk, eyes glass.

She leans down to feel with shaking fingers the bullet holes at heart level in the wall behind her.

* * *

Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, he muses with the tattered little apartments she called home only hours before crackling loudly behind him, their tenants screaming as they blister.

Come out come out wherever you are.

* * *

How's this for a little experiment:

Cute girl, dark alleyway.

Text as you go, tossing your curls, humming your tunes, the world shuttered, danger unnoticed, all of you siphoned into this blinking phone and your click click ticking heels and the freaking _adorable _shoes you saw for half off in Victoria's and how you _deserve _this treat, hard week, shitty _month_, cut yourself some slack, every new pair needs a newer dress-

Tell you a little secret about predators.

They always take the bait.

These ones are only human, and she does not feel at all guilty about eating the first and head butting the second hard enough to sit him down amongst the city's trash and his friend's blood.

She crouches down in front of him, and she makes him describe to her everything they were going to do with her shirt torn underneath them and her legs splayed out before them, and then she punches her tiny little manicured hand through his ribcage, and she rips out his heart and she smashes it to pulp against his face.

She stands.

She turns around with a frown, staring from corner alleyway to main sidewalk.

There is no rustling of jacket, no shifting of silent sentinel feet.

So are you out there or _not_, Stalky McStalkpants?

* * *

There are always lulls in war.

There is the main battle, the little skirmishes which rage on for days along its perimeter, the impermanent lowering of swords and the temporary silencing of muzzles.

The soldiers collected on biers, in trucks, over shoulders.

And then the first rumbling of a new storm.

The bullets are discharged in irregular intervals of thunder; the bayonets lie gleaming before these small black mouths from which issue the flashes of accompanying lightning.

The pauses are long; the men breathe easily.

Vices are exchanged, cigarettes relished, flasks drained.

With rifle in one hand those who have left behind take out their letters and hunker down among the sporadic bursting of shells and the inconsistent rattling of machine guns.

Won't be long now, boys.

Your time is almost up, your service nearly through, look forward to your children and be brave for your wives.

But until peace is put to paper, until the pen has engraved in eternal black man's fickle promises, lower neither rifle nor guard, do not sigh your relief, let no assurance lull you into complacent death, do not go so carelessly to the grave.

The city is still in recovery from the bombings of the previous week and peace has settled like an ash across New Orleans, a thick sort of thing which congeals on the tongue and teases at the back of the throat, a waiting which can be tasted by those with certain historical sensitivities to this sort of thing.

There are a few rebels here and there of course, those who do not obey this quiet which has no contract but is honored nevertheless: trouble at the Renaissance Arts, that terrible tragedy which swept from this world ten innocents in one single charcoal slaughter, three more victims with their skewered chests and their odd cadaver hues.

But a simmering point, nonetheless.

She will not understand this, this girl who has stormed no fields and who has rushed no cannons and who has never sat with her dirty uniform in rags all about her working the rammer down her barrel as the cavalry descends in a magnificent thunder.

Ignorant, yes, stupid, of course not, but for centuries death has never bothered to distinguish between the two, and so with one eye he keeps a lookout for the witch and with the other he watches her go about her tasks with terrifying invincibility.

* * *

She is in a club full of Marcel's allies when the strobes suddenly touch their throbbing white fingers to a head full of dirty blonde curls.

She _knew _he was following her- God he can't leave her freaking _be _for ten _seconds _what is his _problem- _she was just some _hole_, right, why bother- why waste one insignificant _second _of your five _trillion _years on little ol' Second-Choice Forbes-

She spins around.

The man smiles and nods and moves on, and for just a moment she stands rooted, shoulders hunched, eyes brimming.

It's just…the _sinking _that comes with an expectation built too high and a hope nurtured too hard and a prayer whispered too frantically.

* * *

But when on Monday a full moon spills its bright milk all over this city that is forever smoldering and four of them corner her on Decatur, Caroline looks back after her frantic leap from dumpster lid to building rooftop and she sees every last one of them spread out beneath her in little wet red ribbons.

* * *

Klaus is never far behind.

She picks her very fucking exhalations carefully, sifting no dust from ancient leather bindings, gusting no shriveled autumn corpses from their branches, her breaths carefully measured, her heartbeat vigilantly controlled, her scent magically suppressed.

* * *

She is standing with file in hand when the front door slams, and with a sharp "Shit!" she fumbles the folder from one hand to the other, slams it shut, yanks open the filing cabinet, stuffs the thin cream-colored sheaf between its corresponding tabs-

"Caroline," he says quietly, and she shuts her eyes.

How _long _has she wanted to hear those three syllables in just exactly that precise way, the slight lift of the 'Care', the subtle emphasis of 'o' and faint savoring of 'line', the meticulous curling of his tongue around these three little consonants that always seem like so much more than a name-

She turns around slowly.

He is standing in the doorway, hands at his sides, mouth in a line, eyes too open, but that's exactly how he sucked her in before and she will not be _tricked _anymore, not by his stupid accent or his goddamn dimples or the heart he filters out through his lashes and wears pinned to his sleeve, and _God_, just stop with your _face_, asshole-

"Oh," she says crisply. "It's you."

He links his hands behind his back and takes a step forward. "And in my own house; what an odd coincidence."

She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. "I thought you were out."

He takes another step forward. "What are you doing here, Caroline?"

"I came to make a couple of notes on some of the files, and to make sure you hadn't messed up my system."

His mouth parts just a little as he stops, seals itself shut, opens once more. "You're still helping me?"

"I'm helping _me_. The sooner this is all over the sooner I can get out of here without Marcel or some prodigy Emperor-in-waiting Prince Jerkoff or whatever murdering me, right? I mean, it's not like I have any other reason to stay. You made that pretty clear."

His jaw tightens. "Well, you made it pretty clear there wasn't any point in offering you another, now didn't you, Caroline? My apologies, love- the next time a beautiful woman throws herself at me, I'll just don my collar and be off to the nearest rectory, shall I?"

"Well, at least don't they take a vow of silence or something?"

"Just one of chastity, sweetheart."

"Well good luck with that."

He smiles humorlessly. "One for the road then, love?"

"No thanks," she says sweetly. "Once was enough."

His face darkens. "Twice."

"My mistake; must not have been that memorable. I guess I just took some little _piece _of some other guy and superimposed it over you and that's got me all mixed up."

He works his jaw as he takes another step forward. "Am I just expected to pine away with Stefan despondency over somebody who has only one use for me?" He holds up a finger. "Do you know what I think the problem is here, Caroline? No more puppy nipping about your heels, isn't that it?"

"No, actually that was kind of pathetic."

He crosses the room so quickly she steps back with a blink, his hands around her forearms.

He presses himself right up against her, chest, stomach, hips, all of him flush with her, their breaths intermingling, noses nearly touching, hearts in tandem. "Let's not pretend it wasn't a mutually beneficial arrangement, sweetheart," he says with his lips against her ear, his pulse pounding so rapidly she feels its drumming within her own chest, his fingers still in manacles around her arms, his hips bruising hers.

He pulls his mouth slowly from her ear.

He stares at her lips for so long she pinches them nervously together, and now he crawls his eyes along her face until they reach her own, shifts one of his hands from forearm to hip bone, two of his fingers curling underneath her shirt to rest against bare skin.

"Let me go," she snaps.

He smiles coldly, slowly inch by inch slides his fingers from her hip and his chest from her own and then he steps back with both hands up, his oh-who-me-I'm-as-innocent-as-a-newborn-freaking-ki tten smirk on his face, and God he just pisses her off _so much_-

She digs her nails into his shoulders and whips him around so hard she chips plaster from the wall she slams him back against, and now they are again nose to nose, her hands bunched in his shirt, his eyes half-shut, their hips tight, chests pressing. "Do not _manhandle _me."

He opens his eyes all the way.

But he looks too deep, he sees too much, and she can't _do _this, not again, ok, she let him in already and he burrowed down too far and he rooted himself too securely and how he could he have just…_let go_-

She spreads her fingers slowly open, lets his shirt settle back down in crumpled clumps against his shoulders.

"Leaving so soon, Caroline? We were just getting started."

"_We _are not doing anything- starting, finishing, in between, whatever. There is no _we_, Klaus. Period."

"It's funny you say that now when merely a week ago you were more than happy to-"

"I was- drunk!"

"On _what_?" he snaps.

"I don't know! Life?" she snaps right back.

"Perhaps you were merely overwhelmed, having never before been exposed to anything other than little high school boys who spent the majority of your little trysts scratching away fleas-"

"Oh my _God_, you did not just go there. Is every thousand-year-old this much of a bitch when his sexual prowess gets called into question?"

"Well that depends now, love, are his conquests all so delusional-"

"No, but they all played dodge ball in third grade and they still have the sort of unerring aim that brings grown men to tears-"

"Are the two of you going to do something about Nik's little situation, or am I going to be subjected to another twenty minutes of verbal foreplay? It's getting dull."

She jerks away from Klaus with a little start, whipping back around toward the door where Rebekah stands studying her nails, brow furrowed, head tilted. "Ok, did _not _hear you come in."

Rebekah lifts an eyebrow. "Clearly." She crosses her arms. "You can see yourself out now, Caroline."

"She isn't going anywhere, Bekah-"

"Actually, I am. I should have left a very long time ago," she says bitterly.

* * *

If you could take a look, and bottle it.

Of what need has man for his phosgene clouds, his mustard fog; why should he spray his enemy with gas to choke and blind and clog when nothing will ever penetrate so deeply as a woman who does not love back; why must he use steel to tear and lead to pierce when he has at his disposal one weapon to trump them all-

Bekah lets her past with barely a look. "Oops. Did I interrupt something, Nik?" She smiles brightly.

"Get _out_," he snarls.

* * *

Thursday, she comes home to her room trashed and her assailant in pieces on the carpet.

* * *

Saturday, she decides upon another experiment.

Just five brief blocks from the Le Pavillion where she takes up residence after Thursday's little incident is Bourbon Street with its sleepless rows upon rows of bars and after-hour clubs, and into the Tropical Isle Bayou she slips to tuck herself away among the crowd and wait.

She is pressed on all sides by sweating men, twirling women, couples grinding, singles mixing, the performers holding aloft their bright nickel instruments to loud cheers, piercing whistles, drunken requests, and for a moment she is swept away and left to drown among all this sensation: slick thighs, fragrant wrists, throbbing throats, the tropics in a chemical haze all around her, mango lotions, coconut perfumes, hair frozen in stiff lime ringlets, lips dabbed in wet strawberry paint-

Out of the corner of her eye, she spots the vampire first.

And then the hand.

A blur.

Dropped fangs, snaking arms, tangled legs-

The sweat and the blood and the hot metal adrenaline of the fight-

She elbows her way through the dancers.

A man's hand pauses her; a woman's shoulder checks her.

And then the band drops their bright nickel instruments and all around her the crowd take from purses and belts and waistbands little sharpened wooden blades and now dancer turns on dancer, and she cannot force her way free.

She head butts, punches, kicks, scratches, digs in with her nails and holds on with her teeth, dislocates this woman's jaw with a left hook and that man's knee with a low roundhouse, but shit shit _shit _they are _everywhere_-

Something whistles over her left shoulder and embeds itself in the eye of a man who lifts his knife to puncture her sternum, and with a scream he falls back to be stomped down and torn apart.

She whirls.

He smiles and hurls another shot glass over the railing of the second level.

It takes a woman between the eyes with sniper precision.

Ok, well now he's just showing off.

Someone rakes her down the shoulder, and with a cry she heaves them off her, aims a high-heeled kick for the jerk's crotch, staggers drunkenly as some bitch rams her from the side-

She is seized by the throat and slammed down until she cries out, white flashbulbs behind her eyes, blood in her mouth, Damon's hands pinning her and Daddy's eyes reassuring her and she will _not _go down like this-

"_No_!" she snarls, and punches the man who kneels over her twice in the throat until at last he gags and sways and falls, and once more she finds her feet and all over again she pushes forward, jabbing with elbow, heel, teeth, swinging out, tossing down-

"Caroline!"

She spins again.

He twirls one of the chair legs he holds and fires it with javelin accuracy into the throat of a man to her left and the other he tosses to her, and now in one smooth motion she catches, she whirls, she stabs-

She breaks free.

He flashes up to stand beside her.

Back to back, they make short work of the place.

* * *

"Well, now, this is an interesting plot twist."

"I knew you were following me. Why were you following me?" she demands as she pokes among the sweaty little mounds for any survivors.

He squats down in front of the boy who sits with hand to his bleeding nose, eyes wide, fingers shaking. "I confess I was expecting something a bit different, mate- something of the lupine variety. You seem rather ordinary."

"Hello! I asked you a question."

He lifts his thumb to his mouth, wipes away a trickle of blood. "Caroline, love, I'm trying to have a bit of a chat right now."

He hears her heels click away, her accompanying huff, the soft whispering of arm over chest, the slithering of dress along thigh, rabbit heart, sprinter's breaths; she engulfs him in cake-warmed vanilla, frostbitten cocoa, sun-simmered orange-

"You're wearing a new perfume," he remarks absently, studying the boy with cocked head.

She stops and glances back over her shoulder at him, lips pursed, eyes a little softer than he deserves.

"I like it."

"Well, then, you can borrow some, next time you're in the neighborhood. Just don't make a habit out of it; it's expensive." She steps up next to him with both hands on her hips, looking down on the boy with wrinkled brow. "So, what? Now we're dealing with hunters too? Great. Don't we have enough on our plates?"

The boy tries to stand, fumbles his nervous rubber legs beneath him, jerks away with a start as Caroline barks an authoritative "Sit!"

He sinks slowly back to the floor.

"Sorry, mate, when this one snaps her fingers, you've got to jump."

"And I'd like a 'How high, ma'am'?" She flashes him a look from the corner of her eye, crosses her arms once more, juts one slim hip out to the side. "Don't smile at me."

"My apologies."

"Don't look at me either."

"I'll just put out my eyes then, if it pleases her Highness?"

"Ok, _you _do not get to cop attitude with me. You're the one who's gone all Peeping Klaus after basically giving me the 'Don't call me, I'll call you' routine."

_He_- sweetheart, you must be _joking_.

"I believe that's the standard 21st century tradition after such a meaningless little rendezvous, isn't it?" he snaps.

She sets her jaw and lifts both eyebrows and now suddenly they are toe to toe, his shoulders heaving, her eyes spitting, the boy creeping away in the background, a careful heel-toe whispering, a hushed feline slinking-

"I said '_sit_'!" she thunders without taking her eyes from his.

"How many of there are you?" he demands.

"_I'm _talking to him!"

He throws up his hands.

"I'll just wait over here in the corner then, shall I? Can I get you anything while I'm there?"

She presses a finger to her chin, tilts her head, purses her lips. "Um, gee…hmm. Do you have something in a 'Not A Disrespectful Jerkoff Who Eats Kittens For Fun And Then Kills Someone's Grandma Like Right As She Was Taking Cookies To the Homeless'?"

"Yes, because _I _was the one who left without so much as a bloody note-"

"I was _coming back_-"

"Why bother, when you'd made such a clean break of it-"

"Well, I wasn't _trying _to make a break of it- you did that yourself, _jerk_-"

"'It can't be you' is your attempt to build something more? I must say, sweetheart, I find myself with a new appreciation of Tyler Lockwood's rather limited mental capacity, if he was able to decipher such riddles-"

"Well maybe sometimes _people say things they don't mean_."

For just a moment, everything inside of him stalls.

Heart, breath, the clockwork ticking of jaw muscles wound too tight, shoulder tendons coiled too hard-

He waits in marble stillness, his limbs stone, his lids leaden, not a blink stirs his lashes, not a breath touches his lips, how _frozen _he is, watching her eyes flick too much and her lips part too often, the fluttering of anxious fingers, the flattening of damp palm, her skirt twitched uneasily, her shoes rolled from sole to side-

She sighs and shuts her eyes, blinks them back open.

"Just forget it."

He doesn't want to _forget _it, love- to put away among his millions of musings the scent of her hair, the touch of her skin, the softness of thigh, breast, hip- to seal off the pressing of forehead and the twining of fingers and the soft runner's gasp of his name -_overlook _these details, she tells him- lose them among your wars and your empires and your family who languishes below or dismisses above- how can he possibly even entertain the _notion_-

"You were right," she says. "You just want the things you can't have."

He has never denied her and he would never forsake her and why can't she just look _past_- he struck out because she attacked first and if she has been nicked he has taken the knife to the hilt, sweetheart-

She turns back to the boy. "How many of you are there?" she asks quietly, her shoulders hunching in just a little, her head dipping down just a touch.

"I don't know."

"You'll know in a moment," he says tonelessly. "Caroline, hold his arms."

"No- I swear I don't _know_! Galen told us this was a popular vamp hang-out, and he made arrangements with one of the packs for a few of us to help stage everything. The band was on our side, and some of the bouncers. I don't know anything beyond that, I swear to God."

"Galen?" she asks, and he notices how that pricks her interest, how her eyebrows draw together and her shoulders pop back up.

"Galen Vaughan."

"Galen Vaughan- _shit_. Klaus, he's one of the Five."

"I thought you lot took care of that little problem."

"Damon said he did! He said he left the guy on the island when they went to get the cure. In a freaking _well_."

"He's been here for about a week now," the boy supplies eagerly. "He followed one of the original vampires, Rebekah Mikaelson down here. He said she's got the only weapon that can actually kill an original." Something abruptly dawns in his eyes and tightens his hands into fists on his knees, and now suddenly he slithers instinctively back an inch, two, three- "Wait. Oh, shit. 'Klaus' -she called you 'Klaus'- oh _fuck_-"

He takes the boy's head off with a backhand that cracks his frail kindling spine.

"Klaus," she says as he calmly towels his hand off on his jeans. "_Klaus_."

Two, Caroline.

Once there was a boy whose family numbered seven, who did not know a father's love, who never experienced a mother's protection, but into this void there slipped five who did not care, who took him riding in the afternoons and hunting in the evenings, who held his hands, bandaged his lashes, offered him adulation, attention, _friendship_, and _two_, Caroline, this is all he has _left_, and she among them all- Bekah- Bekah he _can't_-

"_Stop_!" she says, and she bars the door with her body and she takes his face between her soft little hands, and for a moment she simply holds him.

If he who is not subject to time could arrest not just lines but minutes; if his hands are to remain forever taut, his forehead eternally smooth, if he can conquer such inevitabilities in this way- why can he not _hold on _to these years with more than just his perpetual youth's face and his timeless athlete's body.

Here is a moment in which Rebekah is not threatened and Caroline does not despise him, and if he could just- if he only knew how to-

She looks at him as though she cares, you see.

And if he squints the past into indistinct blurs of twisted sheets and tangled legs- if he sees not with the mind's brutal honesty but the heart's gentle hope- if he could just _pretend_- for _years _he pretended father wanted him and mother did not wish for something different, and has Niklaus the boy's imagination really diminished so greatly- can he not reduce to watercolor ambiguity everything which unfolded after these twisted sheets and tangled legs-

"Please," she says, stroking her thumbs across his cheekbones, just beneath the eyes. "Before you freak out and go running off with one of the Five on the loose, can you just call her and make sure she's ok, that you don't have anything to worry about? We can plot, and scheme, and wreak havoc after that, ok? We'll figure out a way to deal with this. She'll be ok; I promise. You're not alone, Klaus. You don't have to figure this out by yourself."

Did the Lockwood boy ever catch his breath at just a hint of this smile; did he live from one to the next, desperate to earn another, frantic to deserve just one more; with his paltry eighteen years did he ever appreciate just how rare a smile such as this is, this thing which shakes off the dust and undoes the curtains and lets in so much light-

His phone vibrates in his pocket.

"See?" she asks, and she does not take her hands from his face. "That's probably her right now."

"Nik," his sister greets him as he answers without looking away. "Someone just bloody attacked me. They've got the stake, Nik."

* * *

He unrolls the city map across his desk, and they stand shoulder to shoulder perusing all the little red ants of the thumbtacks, Klaus with his hand on one corner, she with hers to her forehead.

"Ok, so Rebekah was attacked outside Hoi Polloi, which is squarely in Marcel territory. Ballsy; that's pretty much strictly vamps for like five blocks."

"He's one of the Five; they've always been a bit uppity, sweetheart," Klaus murmurs absently.

"But he can't be staying nearby," she continues, "because there is one of him, as far as we know, and uppity or not, he's not going to risk camping out in vamp territory where he's going to be noticed pretty much right away. He's lucky he even got out of there alive after what he did."

Klaus snaps his head up to skewer Rebekah with a look, his shoulder tightening against hers. "How could you possibly have let him just make off with it like that? Don't tell me this one called you pretty too?"

"I didn't have much of a choice, Nik- it isn't like this is some regular little idiot hunter-"

"Yes, and you aren't some regular idiot little vampire- or so I have kindly chosen to believe, sister, even though these past ten centuries, you have tried your best to prove me wrong-"

"Could we _not_? The stake's gone, and some whackjob supernatural vampire murderer is running free around the city with a weapon that can kill both of you, and if the two of you don't mind, I'd like to maybe, if you're not terribly busy, come up with some kind of solution to this that doesn't end with all of us dead, because I'm pretty sure I'll be stuck on the other side with both of you, and I'm not listening to three thousand more years of this."

"Why didn't he kill you?" Klaus demands.

"Don't tell me you're bloody disappointed, Nik-"

"I said _stop_!" she roars in her best halftime voice, abruptly sealing Rebekah's mouth and lifting Klaus' eyebrow, and now she takes her hand from her forehead and she props it instead on her hip, angling herself toward him. "Where's the biggest concentration of humans here in the city? Do you know?"

"Village d L'Est, back in the early twentieth century. Nothing's shifted much since then, from what I've observed. One sides ours, the other theirs."

"So you think maybe he could be staying there?"

"I doubt it. Very suburban; not much in the way of squatter's quarters, love."

"Maybe somewhere that's a little more mixed, then? He'd probably want to be close to the Quarter, wouldn't he? Couple hundred victims right at his fingertips?"

"Maybe he didn't kill me because he's saving the stake."

Klaus twists himself slowly back around to face Rebekah, leaning his hands down on the table, t-shirt straining against his knotted shoulders. "What do you mean?"

"Maybe he doesn't know it's indestructible. Otherwise why would he have spared me? If he thinks it'll be destroyed the moment he stakes an Original, then he'd want to choose carefully, wouldn't he?"

"And if he takes out you, he takes down your entire bloodline- which would be Marcel and just about every other vampire here. He could clear out the whole city with one kill."

He smiles coldly. "Wonderful, Rebekah. If it's not my eternal madness for your boredom, it's my untimely demise for your stupidity."

"Isn't that interesting, Nik- a man who murdered his own mother in cold blood, concerned over a slow Silas-induced spiral, as though he has any sanity or even soul left to be ripped away from him-"

"Yes, dear, sweet, _Mother _who didn't give a bloody _damn _about any of us in the end, Bekah- you should be _thanking _me-"

"For _what_?" she screams, on her feet in a blink. "For sticking us all in boxes every time we didn't leap to do your bidding? For never giving one bloody _damn _about us if we weren't somehow integral to your next nefarious little scheme- for _what_, Nik- tell me one _single thing _I have to be thankful for, chained to a brother like you for all of eternity." She wipes her eyes, clears her throat with a little cough, pushes on ahead with thick voice and trembling hands. "I hope he does kill you, Nik. I hope I can finally be rid of the selfish, insufferable man who has done nothing but hurt me for ten centuries, because he is not the brother I grew up adoring, and emulating, and _loving_."

He goes so still it's like he has been solidified.

"Well," he says at last with no inflection. "Been letting that build for a while, have we?"

She shuts her mouth and crosses her arms and stands breathing so hard, eyes shining, lips trembling.

"Tell me, Rebekah- you miss this boy so much- you miss Niklaus so much- but what have _you _done, sister, to encourage him to find his way back- where were _you_ when he showed up on Mother's doorstep and he waited to be let inside- oh, that's right, Bekah- you'd already come and gone, hadn't you? _You _had already been welcomed back in- _you _were pure, after all, your blood was not tainted, you weren't _twice the monster- __you _still _deserved_, didn't you, _sister_-" He pauses and he presses his hands down harder into the table and he leans forward until each little tendon in his shoulder stands out in stark relief against his shirt, his arms corded, his fingers trembling. "So go on, Rebekah. Hate me. Wish for my death to be speedy yet miserable. But do not compare me to that little _weakling_ who had either to succumb to mother's denunciation and father's loathing or to become something worse than both, so that he could _survive_, so that he wouldn't _care_."

They face each other for just one more fraction of a second, Klaus' jaw twitching, Rebekah's nose running, and then with a sniff she whisks out of the room.

He sinks slowly back into his chair.

"What are you waiting for, sweetheart," he asks blankly, staring down at his hands. "Haven't you any lemon juice for the cut?"

"No," she says simply, and she sits down on the arm beside him.

* * *

She is jolted out of her sleep by a touch to her shoulder and a hand over her mouth.

"Mmmfft!"

"Quiet," Rebekah hisses. "Nik's asleep. We need to keep it that way."

For a moment, she does not understand.

Underneath her spine hisses the five-star opulence of his snooty silk sheets and from out of the dark rear the glossy teak wood heads of his bedposts, but what she remembers last is leaning back in his chair, lids heavy, arms deadweight, someone's hand on her hair, stroking her down into sleep, and where the hell is the _rest_-

"Why am I in Klaus' bed?"

"You fell asleep in the study. Nik carried you up here."

"He did?"

"Yes; it was all very Prince Charming. You're a heavy sleeper, for a vampire."

She rubs the slumber from her eyes, stretches her arms, arches her back, sits up against his pillows with a squint. "Where's he?"

"Still in his study. Drooling all over his little maps. He never believes me when I tell him he drools in his sleep. He snores, too."

She wrinkles her brow into a little frown, wriggling her way up farther out of these five-star covers, smoothing one hand back over her snarled blonde curls. "Why did he put me in his bed? I technically have a room here. Or he could have stuck me in any one of the other gajillion guest rooms."

"I don't know; maybe he's installed cameras to keep an eye on your every adorable little twitch, but this is the only room he's finished wiring?"

"Gross."

"I'm not here to discuss Nik's completely incomprehensible little crush."

"Then why the hell are you here at whatever God freaking awful hour it is? I have beauty sleep I need to get back to."

"You certainly do," Rebekah says sweetly, cocking her head as she smiles.

"Argh! Would you just spit out whatever it is? You're not exactly my go-to choice for 2 AM sleepover heart-to-hearts between back-to-back Nicholas Sparks marathons, you know."

Rebekah sits slowly down on the edge of the bed just a scant inch from her right foot, cheeks pale, eyes scrubbed clean, and how _young _she looks in just her clear lip balm and all the little fumbled-over flakes of the mascara she has cleaned hastily from her lashes.

"I wasn't attacked. I gave the white oak stake to the hunter."

"_What_?!"

"_Quiet_, or I'll gag you for the entire duration of this conversation."

"I'm _sorry_, I'm just having a little difficulty coming to terms with the fact that I was wrong about Klaus calling you stupid just to be a jerk. What the _hell_, Rebekah? Why would you do that?"

"Because I have _tried _to not love my brother, Caroline. After everything he's done, after he's spent _centuries _hurting me and everyone else who disappoints him, after he has done everything he can to take away the smallest of chances for whatever happiness I can glean from a thousand years of misery, I still care about him. I'm still _bound _to him by this bloody 'always and forever' that we swore with Elijah. And I can't- I don't want to spend the rest of my existence constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering when he's next going to show up to ruin my life. I wanted the cure, Caroline. It wasn't boredom, or a whim- I don't _want _to live another hundred lifetimes. I just want one normal human one, where I can go to parties, and have children, and grow old with someone who loves me. I don't want another eternity with him." Rebekah blinks and looks away, her eyes full, and God, if he could _hear _this-

"What about everyone else you'd be killing?" she asks quietly. "What about _Stefan_?"

"I regretted it as soon as I handed it to him."

"And why- I mean, how could you hand him a weapon that could kill you too? And Elijah? He could wipe out the entire vampire population in three freaking hits- _why would you do that_?"

"I was going to take it back, as soon as he staked Nik. I wouldn't have let him use it against me, or Elijah. I was telling the truth earlier- he doesn't know it's indestructible. He thinks it will be destroyed as soon as he kills an Original, and he wants Nik; like you said, he could free an entire city all at once." She wipes her eyes quickly and takes a deep breath. "I told him…I told him to get to Nik, he needed you. That if he wanted to draw Nik out, he needed to hurt you. He's going after you next, Caroline."

She pauses for a very long time, looking at this girl who has lived forever, who still understands so little.

"So I guess I get to play little blonde bait again."

"Are you going to tell Nik what I did?"

She pauses again, fixes her eyes very solidly on this ten times over centenarian with her smooth teenaged cheeks and her soft adolescent hands. "No. Because he would be so hurt, if he knew."

* * *

But he knows more than you will ever suspect, sister.

He sits with his legs stretched before him and his hands steepled in front of him, and this little irritation behind the heart, Rebekah- this is precisely how it began that warm spring morning with the flowers just unfurling their tentative infant petals and the horses in an uneasy shifting within their stalls, and mother- mother with her pretty blonde hair so full of the sun- _mother _who stood upon that step and mere days after father slashed up his heart ripped out its remainder-

You think, sister, that because you have deemed him incapable of love it means he is forever sheltered, safe behind his carapace of hatred and his chest plate of fury.

He is fueled by his lust, for power, death, destruction he hungers, but do you know, Bekah, the most potent petroleum of them all- do you truly believe this monster who is unworthy of your loyalty is so removed from Niklaus the boy, that what drove the former no longer motivates the latter?

The man who couldn't love.

How utterly bloody _ironic_, how _amusing_, sister, that you would hurl this of all accusations- that _you _of _all people _cannot _see_.

Well, Bekah.

Don't we all deserve what we expect, hmm, sweetheart?

* * *

Caroline suggests a dividing of resources.

More ground covered, extra clues unearthed, further leads pursued.

Boy vs. girls.

But he has a better idea, love.

Let the hunter come to him.

* * *

"You want to go clubbing?" Rebekah demands incredulously. "You hate that sort of thing, Nik."

"What I want is to draw out the hunter. He'll strike only when he believes me to be vulnerable, distracted, when he thinks he actually has a chance against the most powerful creature in the world."

Caroline snorts. "He's going to have to puncture your massive ego first. I think you're pretty safe; he's got a long ways to go before he hits anything vital."

"He'll sniff out that trap right away, Nik. You're notoriously paranoid. You really think he'll buy that you'd just cut loose with one of the Five running around armed with a white oak stake?"

He smiles and tilts himself back in his chair, feet up on his desk. "Well, if the lad's done his homework and he's currently up-to-date on his original family trivia, he'd know that you and I are hardly on the best of terms. Perhaps he thinks you wouldn't bother to inform me of any potential danger, that in fact you might sit quietly by while my downfall just tiptoes along toward my unsuspecting back. Poor little Klaus- the man who has seen it all and yet still harbors such a blind spot for that family of his." He walks his fingers across his desk with eyebrows lifted, smile still on his lips.

Rebekah looks away, throat bobbing, shoulders stiffening.

"Poor lad. An only child, no doubt- doesn't understand the _ties _that bind together a family. How no matter the ill will between siblings, they would never betray one another in such a manner."

He never loses his smile.

* * *

There's this little place on the corner, a real 'den of iniquity' to quote Mr. Original Asshole himself.

Strictly vamp only, a refuge for the monsters of this city, a place where one can truly let down their hair and revel in everything it means to be one of these eternal creatures of stopped clocks and velvet cheeks.

Rebekah, love, keep an eye to the alleyways he tells his sister, but her he pulls inside, his fingers too tight on his arm, his breath too close to her cheek.

Something is wrong with him.

Ok, of _course_ something is wrong with him, God isn't that just the understatement of the freaking century, but it's so far beyond his usual crazy that for the first time since he walked into that room with her deathbed sighs and her childhood toys, she is afraid of him.

There's something…_lurking _underneath his calm smile and his empty eyes, and when he shoulders away into the crowd and returns just a few moments later with drinks for them both, she takes hers without touching his fingers, heart hammering, palms perspiring.

"Bottoms up, sweetheart," he says with that vacant, vacant smile, and he downs his with one blurred flick of his wrist.

In the corners writhe couples with wrists to one another's mouths, their slurping loud, their moans louder, and now along her spine crawls a prickling sort of discomfort, a hyperawareness of him and the A positive in her drink and the wriggling of this dance floor in a slick pulsing all around them, hands brushing her, hips nudging her.

Some guy grazes her ass on his way to her hip, and in a blink Klaus has him on the floor, his wrist broken, his ribs crushed.

"It's common courtesy to _ask _a lady before attempting a dance, _mate_."

She pulls him away before he can kill the guy.

"Would you calm the hell down?" she hisses, yanking him by the collar of his shirt into an unoccupied corner.

He seizes a nearby man by the shoulders and compels him to bring them another round of drinks, and with blank bovine eyes the man shuffles off obediently, his girlfriend in tow.

"We're supposed to be drawing a bit of attention to ourselves, sweetheart."

He is already so flushed she wants to know what the hell was in his drink, his eyes glassy, his hands shaking, and now as the guy returns with shots in hand, he tosses this one back as well, barely tasting either blood or alcohol.

"You know we're not really supposed to get hammered, right? So he can't _actually _kill you because you're uncoordinated and stupid and-"

He slips his hands over her hips and he brings his face uncomfortably close to her own and there is this moment.

It's not the first they've had.

Unblinking eyes, stalled breaths, pulses too fast and seconds too slow, the world reduced, the dancers put away, all of existence funneled into these lips close enough to taste and those eyes deep enough to drown, and God how can he still _do _this to her- she doesn't _want _this, not after everything that has been said, not after he made her _believe _and then he ripped her apart-

"We need him properly put at ease, now don't we, love?" He smiles. "Dance with me?"

She stares at his lips for too long.

He holds her hips too closely against his own.

The dancers jostle them closer together and on all sides she is assaulted by sweat, blood, pheromones, her fangs tingling, her stomach coiled, his hands too hot through her skirt, his chest too hard against her own, and now something flares briefly in his eyes as she tips her own shot up to her lips and she drains it with him just an inch away.

He reaches up to catch the little leftover drop of blood-laced whiskey on her bottom lip, and he sucks it from his thumb without looking away, his free hand still curled around her hip.

* * *

He doesn't like this kind of dancing, this damp jumble of flailing arms and grinding hips and impulsive footwork, but like all other styles he knows precisely what he is doing.

He keeps his hips pressed against her ass, his cheek to hers, and if she leans back into him and she lets his hands creep from waist to stomach to sternum, if she wants to slide down her own hands and urge them just a little higher it is just because she has not let go like this in so long- the things you _feel _with your enhanced senses- the friction of fingertips, groin, stubble, the slow salt slide of sweat between the breasts, over the throat, down the nape, the clenching of gut, thighs, hands-

She rolls her head back against his shoulder.

He tips his own back to keep his cheek against hers, his mouth open, his breathing rough.

"Let's make this believable, shall we, sweetheart?" he whispers in her ear, and he lifts his wrist to his mouth and he rips open the vein.

She is not going here, not _again_, not with this man who promised her so much and delivered so little, who like all those before him did not love her enough, who smells so good and who is so hard, who slides the hand he does not proffer from hipbone to thigh fork-

* * *

She turns her face.

Just enough for her lips to graze, her lashes fluttering, her hips still rolling, and now out comes her tongue, just a quick dart, a hasty taste and now back between her lips she takes this little piece of him, eyes half-mast, mouth parted, and how she _unravels _him.

Bekah has betrayed him.

Bekah with her sunny smile and her lavender skirts, Bekah with her hands that soothed and her words that reassured- _Bekah _who once promised always, who can no longer endure this pledge, and if you could just help him to forget for a moment, _please_, Caroline, if he could only _lose _himself-

"Klaus," she breathes, and he blurs them both away back into the shadows.

The lights throb.

The dancers pulse.

He is assaulted by so many things: aerosol cosmetics, satin cheek, silk thigh, the gloss of hair, mouth, eyes, her shuddering inhales and her peppermint exhales, the hesitant slinking of fingers along his shoulder blades, the cautious pressure of hip curve against pelvic bone.

He shuts his eyes, and he kisses her shoulder.

And what she does not understand, this small town girl who has not even managed a plurality of decades never mind the centuries he has tucked beneath his belt and he has stored within his heart- what she cannot possibly grasp, she who has known only the love of boys with their trivial insect years, is the _significance _of these shut eyes and these lips pressed for so long to one spot.

She is not so removed from her humanity that years are merely a snowfall, one piled on top of another on top of another, centurial layers, wars sandwiched between uprisings buried beneath massacres, her blinks do not roust monarchies, her sleep does not raze kingdoms.

There is still impact in a moment and anticipation in a touch.

She has not yet learned that even for the immortal does the reaper get his final say and have his last laugh, that if he cannot stop the heart or still the lungs he turns instead to these fragile bonds of man that even a monster cannot help but forge.

But he has seen.

For a thousand years, he has watched this family to which he will never truly belong, Niklaus the half, and he has tried to hold on and he has watched them slip through, and still he gets so lost in you, love.

* * *

"Don't," she tells him as he moves from shoulder tip to collarbone edge, his mouth reverent, his fingertips careful.

He looks up with flushed face and burning eyes, and she pushes him back by the shoulders, sets him away at arms length.

"_Don't_."

Here is the thing Damon and Daddy and so many others before never understood.

She is not your toy. You don't get to reach down inside of her and scramble her all to pieces and then just leave her _strewn about_, here a part, there a part, step on them all you want, no need to pick anything up, it's only _Caroline _after all, what has she to contribute but her iron fist and her dictator bark and her second-place smile.

But she's _more_, ok- she is not just a hole to be plugged and a mouth to be shut, she is a _person_, and she is _trying_, and this- this is all that can ever be _asked_.

You do not expect perfection, from a girl whose father never came home and whose mother always worked late. You do not expect flawless face and faultless personality from someone abandoned by Daddy and misunderstood by Mommy, who was never quite enough, who always lacked something else.

Graft on different lips, another's legs, new breasts, smoother skin, whiter teeth- do whatever the hell you _want_ with all these little disassembled pieces of her, jigsaw them apart, paste them together, separate, mix about, but don't you freaking _dare _for an instant expect her to participate in this callous deconstruction.

* * *

There is a building within him.

A surging of the tide, you might compare it to.

A thousand years ago he stood before his mother and he didn't _understand; _he didn't _mean _to; wasn't he entitled to any forgiveness whatsoever, _please_, give him another chance, just hold his hands, stroke his hair, only touch him like he is son and not stranger-

But her hands, you see, they lifted only to push him away, to hold him back, to reiterate what Mikael always assured him was true and Rebekah forever guaranteed was not.

Niklaus Mikaelson will always be less.

Niklaus Mikaelson has no place.

Niklaus Mikaelson will never mean more.

But a mother is supposed to accept, she is meant to open her arms, to press cheek to breast, to stroke curls from eyes, to kiss the forehead, soothe the heart, allay wounds both corporeal and spiritual, to never not be _proud_.

This same surging of the tide filled him to the brim and split him apart at the seams and out roared something he never could quite put back, and into her chest he thrust his hand to the wrist, through her skin burst her heart, from her mouth issued her scream, down palm, off fingers dripped the little red raindrops of this familial blood he still tastes with his tongue and smells with his nostrils and feels with his ancient war-sandpapered fingertips.

And now here it comes again, love.

Denied by mother, deceived by sister, scorned by lover- isn't that bloody _fantastic_, Caroline- round of applause, sweetheart, for the loyalty of woman, isn't she _lovely_; doesn't she _inspire_; what a _treat_, to be surrounded by this tender gender of soft sensitivities and gentle affection for the next millennium- for the next _two_, because what Bekah will never understand is that he will not be _brought down_, he cannot be defeated, he will never not _succeed_.

She sees something in his eyes, and she steps instinctively back.

And here, love, is how you know it's real, that what he feels is no mere passing flutter of the schoolboy crush.

His mother's rejection cost her life, his sister's will bring about something far worse, but _you_, Caroline-

From you he takes neither heart nor freedom.

From you, he merely walks away.

* * *

She follows him out onto the sidewalk.

There is a scraping far above her, a grating of shoe sole on roof tile, a breath let out, a crouch unraveled, a leap taken-

"_Klaus_!" she screams, and with one hand he swings her around in front of him where there is no danger, and with the other he peels the man from his back and he throws him with a loud crack into the wall to their left.

For just a moment, there is only her asthmatic terror, the clattering of wood on pavement, the abrasion of panicked fingernails.

His cyclone breath right beside her ear.

The slow tissue crackling of his hand shifting about on her hip.

And then the tap tap tapping of her designer heels.

He is smiling.

She slowly unhooks her fingernails from his forearms and she steps away, heart thundering, breath shaking, knees wavering.

"Bravo, little sister."

She watches Rebekah stop three inches shy of the white oak stake, hip cocked, arms crossed, toe tapping.

Klaus links both hands behind his back, smile steady, chin tipped down just a little, eyebrows raised. "Well go on, Bekah. Pick it up."

"What the hell are you _doing_, Rebekah-"

"Would you shut your shrill little mouth?" she snaps.

"Pick. It. _Up_, Bekah," he repeats slowly, tilting his head inch by eerie inch to one side, a measured movement, a predatory swivel of blank eyes and still-smiling mouth, and now in the pit of her stomach there is a sudden foaming, a frothing of bile and blood and booze.

"I hope you're looking forward to another fifty-two years of hell, Nik- he's awfully still."

He unclasps his hands to spread them before him, his smile never dropped, his eyebrows not even faltering. "What does it matter, love, when I am apparently to meet my doom on this fine night?"

"Everything you said-"

"Well, I had to get him out of the house somehow, didn't I? A heartfelt confession to his precious Caroline suggesting she was in danger seemed to be the perfect way to ensure he'd bring the fight to the hunter, rather than burrowing into the house like the coward he is. And him in the study eavesdropping away, just devastated over this betrayal by his beloved _Bekah_, who would never, whose only bloody _purpose _is to be tugged about and walked all over and locked away in a box, when she doesn't agree. He's so much less careful, when his feelings are hurt. When he understands that he is _nothing_, that no one cares, that he has always been alone, even surrounded by his family who loathes him."

"_Pick it up_," he roars, and she does.

Go on, he urges her.

Strike back, score him deep, make him _pay_.

She stares up at him with so much naked pain in her eyes and he looks back with even more obvious hurt in his own, and then she tells him, "Maybe I'll just take away the only thing you care about. And you can just _stand here_, Nik, and you can watch while your own family murders someone you love so much."

* * *

He is always faster.

Better, stronger, more advanced.

A new link in the evolutionary chain.

Another tier on this pyramid of progression man has spent so long stacking higher and higher and higher, always reaching for more, always attempting to move beyond, to breed better, to advance farther.

And so of course he beats Bekah to Caroline, of course he sweeps her safely out to one side, stumbling as she goes, of _course _if his superior speed and senses and strength have ever served him well it is in this moment, for this girl-

But she is not far behind him on the steps of this pyramid, his little sister, and though he deflects her attack, he does not halt its thrust.

* * *

He goes so limp so fast, and oh God oh God oh _God _the _blood_-

"_What did you do_?" she screams, catching him around the waist as he sags, collapsing with him, her hands full of his shirt, her chin pressed to his hair, and now across from her Rebekah folds similarly, lands on her hands and knees with a little watery hiccup of a breath, eyes shut, mouth open-

She lowers him gently back to the pavement, takes his cheeks between her hands, feels his cold blue skin and his rough blonde stubble, and no no no no _no _please _please _Oh God, _breathe_, Forbes, through the nose, out the mouth, curl the tongue, curb the bile- but _Bonnie_, she lost her just months ago, it hasn't yet been a _year_, she can't- _she can't_-

"_You killed him_!"

"He isn't _dead_!" Rebekah shrieks. "_He isn't dead_! We burn when we die- it must have nicked him- pull the bloody thing out!"

She feels blindly across his chest for the stake, yanks it with a moist squelch from his heart, kneels holding him with her numb hands and her stopped heart and her empty lungs-

And he sits up in her arms with the loudest breath he has ever taken, and he opens his eyes.

There's this assumption, about things like her and creatures like him.

They don't deserve to walk this earth, once dead forever buried, how unnatural _are _they, these zombie men and women who died before their time, who kicked the dirt back over their grave, who shuffled forth to feed upon the living, the mortal, the _deserving_.

And you know what, _this is her_:

She still remembers the scent of that fair, the grease, the caramel fog and the sharp animal musk, and her first human throat-

She feels its meat between her teeth and she hears again his jagged little hiss and that accordion body, folding so compliantly into her arms- _God_, how she misses that.

And him.

Oh, _him_.

He held a mother beneath the surface, he slaughtered a whole pack out of spite, he brought down nations just because.

But do not _reduce _them to this.

Do not diminish them to a diet, do not _tell _her the thirst is all they are, don't for a freaking _moment _insist he is just a monster and she is only a beast when she can't hold him close enough and he can't return her grip hard enough, when all she can do is sit here so limply and hug him so tightly.

You think you know everything, you with your ticking clock and your brittle straw bones.

Because time bleaches your hair and crinkles your eyes and hobbles your step you have the right to judge, to look beyond man's own monstrosities, to declare hers so much worse and his so far beyond, to insist that everything she feels so damn _deeply _is only some kind of relic, humanity's leftovers, habit and not passion.

But _listen _to the tears in her voice, to all the separate little syllables of the soft little "Hi" she gives him in pieces and tell her -_tell her- _that she is just a pair of fangs and some cheeks that will never age- tell her that somewhere along the way she did not throw everything she _is _into loving him because she is _incapable_, because she cannot _manage_, because once she was Caroline the girl but now she is only Caroline the thing.

"You're ok," she says with something that might be either a laugh or a sob, and now across from them Rebekah sniffles and sits up with a shaky little exhale, and suddenly he is no longer in her arms.

* * *

"You don't want another eternity with me, Rebekah? Allow me to assist you, then, sister," he says calmly.

He stabs her until she retches, twists the tip about in her chest, thrusts it deeper, presses her back and back and back, her spine to the wall, his hands to her shoulders, and now she can only droop here frothing red at the mouth, leaking black from the sternum, and oh the _irony_, dear sister.

How does it _feel_, such an attack from one who is required to love you.

How does it _feel_ to look with salt-blinded eyes into the face of one who was once a savior, who shared childhood beds, secret places, youthful dreams- _how does it feel Rebekah why don't you detail this for him, sister_- how hollow is your chest, how leaden your stomach -_tell him everything_- you've no idea how long this will _sustain _him, sweetheart-

He stabs her again.

"Klaus, _don't_!" she screams from behind him. "Klaus, _stop_!"

"Oh don't worry, Caroline, I'm not going to kill her. I just want her incapacitated. She wouldn't hear any of this, with a dagger in her heart." Another thrust, a deeper hit, a scraping of the heart but not a penetration, because this, _this_, sweetheart, is worth a listen if he says so himself.

"I'm going to put you back in that box you despise so much, Bekah. But here's the rub, love- I no longer have any use for you. You are utterly worthless to me. Ninety years, Bekah- that was _nothing _to how long you will rot away in that coffin this time around. But I'm not cruel, Rebekah." He looks away with a laugh, buries it in the crook of his arm, swings his head back around to spit another burst of mirth right in her face. "I wouldn't want you to miss out on everything, now would I?" He flashes his dimples. "So every so often, say perhaps a decade or two, I'll give you a glimpse of everything you're missing. That bartender's funeral- I'm sure you wouldn't want to miss out on that, hmm? Stefan's marriage to his precious Elena? What say…an hour, perhaps? A bit like a time-out, except the opposite- all of eternity is going to be time spent in the corner for you, Bekah, and up just out of your reach, a window. And every, oh, twenty years or so, when I'm perhaps feeling a bit sentimental, I'll give you a stool."

He smiles.

He jerks the stake until she screams.

* * *

She squeezes her eyes shut so tightly, takes a breath, two, three, and when she opens them once more, he is already gone.

So is the hunter.

* * *

When she reaches the mansion, Rebekah is already in a pile on the floor, Klaus beside her with his legs stretched out in front of him and one hand on her hair.

She stops in the doorway of his studio and stands looking down at him for a very long time.

He never lifts his eyes.

He has his other hand palm up on his thigh, his fingers curled, his shoulders hunched, all of him collapsed in and curled over.

"My dad left my mom and me when I was eight."

There is a little twitch through his shoulders, a brief spasm in his hand.

"He was gay, and he left us for another man. I didn't get that of course, that it wasn't about me, that my parents' marriage wasn't over because I didn't brush my teeth the first time my mom asked or because I ate cookies for breakfast even though I was expressly forbidden from having any until after dinner. I thought maybe if I had just behaved a little better, you know? That maybe if I hadn't thrown a temper tantrum because he only read me one story before bed or if I didn't leave my toys all over the house or if I did all my chores every single day without complaining once- I thought if I had just _done that_, he wouldn't have had to go find another family. I felt so, so alone."

His hand spasms again, tenses up into a fist.

"And through all of that, you know what I wanted most of all, if I couldn't have my family back together? I just wanted my mom to come home early once in a while. I just needed her to be there, to tell me that it wasn't me, that I hadn't chased everyone off, that my dad was gone because of some weird adult thing that I wouldn't understand for years and years. I just needed my _mom_. And so did you. And every time they weren't there for us, it killed us a little inside. Because we thought it meant they didn't love us, and we wanted to know _why_, and if maybe we didn't deserve it, and _why _we didn't deserve it, what we had done that was so freaking _bad_, but do you know what I think?"

She feels her throat clog and her sinuses flame and her eyes spill over, and she keeps going.

"I think we do. Even you. Even after a thousand years of everything you have done, I think someone should love you. I think that no matter how horrible you sometimes are, they should still believe in you, and do you know what else I think? She does. Do you really think that everything she said to me wasn't true? Why do you think she had this whole thing set up with the hunter? Why not just kill you herself? Because she couldn't _do it_, Klaus. Because she has never been able to go through with hurting you. Because she loves her brother even after everything he has done to her, and no matter what she tells herself, she will never be able to be without him. She just wants to be treated like a person and not a pawn."

He takes a shaky breath.

"So you can leave her in that coffin. You can hold a grudge for the next gajillion years. But you have a _family_, and that is so much more than some people. And none of us, not even people who are supposed to get forever- _none _of us knows exactly how much time we're going to have."

* * *

She clicks quietly away down the stairs, wiping her eyes as she goes.

He looks up at the ceiling and blinks very rapidly.

In the tenth century you were his friend, in the eleventh his nemesis, come the twelfth all was forgiven, round about the thirteenth you were at his throat once more.

But Bekah, what strikes him most of all- what stands out so clearly in this centuries-long line-up of recollections- what he has _always _remembered through German mud and Irish gunpowder and American cannons-

It isn't the duplicity, sister, the plots foiled and the revenge taken.

When mother-

When mother laid in his arms a warm little bundle and helped him cradle in his hands its squalling red face and told him, Niklaus you have a sister-

Bekah-

Bekah, he-

A younger sibling is a thing of copycat gestures, tattletale confessions, an annoyance, a hindrance, a hanger-on.

They are to be abandoned in the woods and left behind at the house.

They follow the heels too closely, they imitate the voice too shrilly, they are worst enemy, best friend, horrible monster, miracle cherub.

Protect her, nurture her, _cherish _her, Niklaus, mother bade him.

And when she fell off his horse- who wiped her eyes on his shirt and told her there, there, up again we go, don't let him get the better of you like that, brave little Bekah; when he stumbled in the dark and he broke his ankle on a stump who slipped her arm round his shoulders and helped him back to the village; who pretended he did not cry when father ridiculed him and mother ignored him; who broke his toys and sobbed through her apology; who mangled the face of her first lad, a nose for a heart, mate, be grateful you've made off with your legs, hurting the Mikaelson sister like that-

Who has never forgotten that warm little bundle or that squalling red face; who has never in a thousand _years_, Bekah, stopped wanting to break apart anyone who would dare hurt you-

He once went a hundred years without her, and if this was the slowest of all his centuries, it is no coincidence, and to now face a hundred, a thousand more of these days stretched too long and these decades elongated too far-

Man has a certain fascination with mortality, an obsession with time and how he may trap it and if he can prolong it.

But a monster is confronted with precisely the opposite problem.

If he has no sister he has not merely a collection of decades until they are reunited; if he wanders on alone death will not sweep along on dry mummy winds to terminate misery as it snuffs breath.

If he is irredeemable, insufferable, _unlovable_, he remains so until the humans colonize Mars and the androids populate Venus and the sun no longer burns.

He escapes beneath no headstone, he is admitted to no heaven, he befriends no devil, he is not pardoned by a God.

There is no road so long as that which holds no other travelers.

A concert enjoyed, a sight to behold, words that move and images that inspire- of what use are any of these to one pair of eyes; a novel not shared, a painting never discussed- what is the _point_, how do they _matter_, stored away in such a manner?

He sifts her hair with his fingers.

He keeps his eyes on the ceiling, and he slips his fingers slowly inch by inch from skull to shoulder to hilt.

* * *

He finds her on a bench outside the Renaissance Arts, listening to the violin player with her hands tucked beneath her thighs.

She says nothing when he sits down beside her with hands folded in his lap, his knees spread, his leg careful not to brush up against her own.

They sit saying nothing for a very long time.

"You know, there was a music hall, in Paris. The Académie Royale de Musique. One of many names; that was what it was known as in 1815. I was freshly home from Waterloo, Rebekah was busy rubbing elbows with the Parisian aristocracy. I spent most of my time there while we lived in the city. I would go, and I would sit for hours, and all I could do was just…listen."

She stares fixedly ahead, her hands not shifting, her profile not moving.

"I think there's something about music that reaches us on a deeper level. You can't explain it, there's no word for what it creates, why a b-flat or a talented contralto stirs something inside of us, how a single chord can inspire so many different emotions. It's like art. You view a few smears on a canvas, and something happens. Where it comes from, how it happens, who can explain? I imagine I would need at least another thousand years to work it all out."

"I don't think you'd figure it out in a million years," she says quietly. "That's the whole point, isn't it? We never know. We see a cute puppy, we're happy. Our friend cries because their boyfriend cheated on them, and it's like we've been stabbed too. Someone hurts us and we cry or we scream or we break things, but we don't know _why_." She looks over him at last, face carefully neutral. "What did you do in Paris, other than beat up Napoleon? By the way, was he really that short?"

"I didn't 'beat up' Napoleon in Paris, firstly because I was on his side, and secondly because Waterloo didn't exactly spill over into the streets of the city, love."

"I know that. Netherlands, June 18th- Napoleon had this brilliant plan to bring in all his artillery, which way outnumbered the English guns, except he kinda' got screwed over by all the rain and had to start the battle late to wait for the ground to dry out. Wellington was able to withstand several attacks by the French, then later that evening the Prussians showed up and broke through Napoleon's right flank. He got spanked, surrendered, and then died in exile. Some of us do pay attention in history class, you know."

He looks down at his hands with a little smile. "A far more succinct summary than I could ever manage. Of course, it's a bit of a different experience, in the field rather than behind a textbook."

"I can imagine."

He squints away toward the violinist, unlacing his fingers, folding them back together, taking them apart once more. "I painted, I frequented the cafes and the Académie. I lost a friend."

"Your horse?"

"Yes. I left right after that, a few months after Waterloo."

"Where'd you go after that?"

"Italy. For about three years. Kol and I had a bit of fun with Vatican City; stuffy place, really. Very restricting."

"Yeah, I hear that a lot about religious institutes. No junk food, no TV, no blood orgies; it's pretty ridiculous, honestly. Kind of like this summer camp I went to when I was twelve. One of the counselors got her panties in a twist over some nail polish I had, and I can only just _imagine _what she would have said about the blood orgies. And the animal sacrifices."

"You sound as though you were rather advanced for your age."

"Well they wouldn't give us a Ouija board."

She slips her hands from beneath her thighs, and she sets them carefully down in her lap. "So. Where did you put her? Middle of the Mississippi? Freaky medieval torture dungeon that I just know has to be under your house?"

He undoes his hands one final time, and lays them down flat against his thighs. "I believe she's currently in the bath. She's always been a bit fussy about getting her hands dirty, little picky about sweat, that sort of thing. After the advent of indoor plumbing, we didn't see her for nearly a week."

Her smile lasts for only a moment.

It is a corner of the eye thing, a peripheral flash, a faint hint, a mere suggestion.

And yet how much he is expanded, catching its flicker.

* * *

**A/N: So, a few things.**

**Galen Vaughan and his ridiculously sexy accent saw way too little screen time as far as I'm concerned, so I'm resurrecting him. We didn't find out about his death until after the veil was dropped, which wasn't until the last couple of episodes, and as I mentioned before, this is AU after 4x19, so at that point in the show, so far as we knew, he could still be alive. (And I've decided he is. Was. Whatever. The point is, I will not accept his death, just as I am still not over Kol's.)**

**Also, I said in an author's note in the last one-shot that we'd see more build-up between Marcel and Klaus in this fic, which was obviously a lie. (I didn't mean for it to be, I swear.) I wanted a little lull after the shitstorm of the last one-shot to deal with family dynamics, and it just so happened that Marcel didn't want to show his face. However, we are definitely going to see some interactions between them in the next fic. I think this is actually going to be the one in which I will cover how Klaus and Marcel met and the circumstances leading to his transition and mentoring. **

**And I don't know what happens when you stab an Original in the heart with a white oak stake but don't actually impale them, so I decided upon desiccation but not death. It was mean, but Caroline needed a rather dramatic catalyst to finally come to terms with her feelings for Klaus.**

**Klaus was horrible in this, but he took a monumental step forward in letting Rebekah go. And Caroline- our girl made some pretty important strides forward herself, didn't she? **

**A member of the Five loose, a bitter Sophie on the run, murderous siblings, unresolved Klaroline...where oh where is this all going?**

**Tune in next time, and thank you so much for sticking with me.**


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